Editing City Series:Volume5a Chapter1 (section)

===Beretta’s Journal===

Today I’m writing with the view from a 1st floor guest room instead of the usual elevated view from my ''appartement''. I’m feeling pretty good after getting a bath and some dinner, but my mood is not exactly great.

What am I supposed to do tomorrow?

The old man who healed me will apparently repair the Heavy Barrel. (He claims to be a Knight Striker himself.) He hasn’t asked all that much about my identity either, so who even knows.

I was only involved in the Resistance for 3 days, but it looks like I’m back to my usual life. Maybe I should think of it as a valuable experience as an exchange student. At least the changes to history will end here.

Maybe I just haven’t calmed down yet. I took part in combat back in America when I helped out the city’s vigilante group a few times and I’ve fought a triple digit number of mock battles.

I think it’s really hitting me hard that people died because of me. I shouldn’t have agreed to that just because I was itching to Write Bring into a Heavy Barrel again. After assembling it and doing a test run, I was supposed to officially join the Resistance, but I don’t feel like doing that anymore.

My motive there wasn’t exactly pure, was it? They all took it seriously enough to face death.

I bet this is all from the stress of fighting with that idiot Phillip a week ago. That idiot said he’s quitting college and joining the German Army just because they’ve prepared an “honorary officer” position for him.

History proves he can’t afford to go there. Phillip Missel uses his position as an honorary officer to act as a Resistance spy. And during the Resistance uprising on August 1, he takes part as a Knight Striker and dies. With that, the Missel family, a former Chevalier de Paris family, is destroyed. Everyone in Paris recognizes that family’s Signe de Épée, but it will die out once that happens.

But there was no way he would believe me if I told him that and he was sure to ask how exactly I knew. And so we’ve ended up fighting every time we see each other recently.

I can’t believe it. As if today wasn’t bad enough, the more people I get to know, the more stressed out I get.

I almost wish I hadn’t done any research into this era. Instead, I made sure to learn about the people who died as part of the Resistance, the activity of famous people, and the conflicts that crop up here and there.

The railroad in Champagne is bombed tomorrow afternoon and the Normandy landings begin on June 6. Plus, Mallette gets caught in the Format and Phillip dies on August 1. On August 3, the German Army invades Bourgogne, angers a black dragon, and gets trampled along with an entire village.

From outside the closed-off city, France was swallowed by the Rondeau in August of ’44, so the European battlefront had to avoid France. The Allies were forced to invade Germany from the south and north to finally drive Germany to surrender.

That was all in the past.

As long as my involvement today wasn’t found out and everything around me is fine, I can return to my normal life tomorrow. I need to seriously focus on why I came to France.

I have two reasons for being here.

The first is pretty much the same reason I became a Knight Striker: The Attesor Project. That mysterious French Heavy Barrel development project was written of in a Death Techno compilation book sold before the war. I wanted to see if it actually existed. After all, some documents concerning it turned up in my great-grandfather’s things back home.

My great-grandfather, Jack McWild, was originally an American technical officer and he had visited France as an adviser. That was when the Attesor Project began.

My grandma had always been proud of him and I think it must have spread to me. The next thing I knew, I was a weird girl who was interested almost exclusively in Sein Fraus and Heavy Barrels. As my curiosity grew, I found myself dying to investigate the Attesor Project and to find out what my ancestor had done.

The other reason was my grandma.

Her parents, Jack McWild and Rose Francisca, had broken up for a few reasons. Jack McWild had taken my grandma with him when he moved to San Francisco where he built the Sein Frau maintenance factory where the family still lives, but in ’39, his corpse was found floating in the Seine here in Paris.

And in ’43, the Allies recruited my grandma for her skill as a Knight Striker and she infiltrated Paris as an exchange student. But while she was sent in to support the Resistance as a Knight Striker, I think she really went to investigate my great-grandfather’s death.

In the end, she escaped to America just a few days before the Wort Bombe detonated. I’m sure a lot happened, but from what I’ve heard, the failure of the Paris Resistance’s uprising on August 1 hit her pretty hard. Some people consider her a traitor and a deserter, but I don’t mind.

I mean, it’s thanks to that that she happened to miss the Format and became one of the First Erased. If not for that, my father and I would never have been born.

But my grandma did have one regret. She knew that Jack McWild and Rose Francisca broke up due to a misunderstanding between them and he apparently went back to Paris to make up with her.

After Jack McWild went to Paris, my grandma found a letter in the study of our home. It was addressed to Rose Francisca, but only with a name; there was no actual address given. He had likely thought she would understand once they found each other, decided not to mail it, and forgot about it without ever writing in the address.

I came to Paris with that letter.

The exchange students like me are supposed to investigate France and help create a backup before France fully closes itself off. In other words, the world is going to abandon France without liberating it.

However, it can’t be liberated.

The world has reached the year 1998, but France is still connected to the years of 1943 and 1944. If France is liberated, it will be restored within 1944. My world of ’98 has been a world without France ever since ’44, so that restoration would create a 54 year paradox that would destroy the world of ’98.

I don’t have the guts to remake my “world without France” into a new “world with France”.

I want to investigate the Heavy Barrel development project known as the Attesor Project and I want to get Jack McWild’s letter to Rose Francisca to accomplish what my grandma failed to do.

My grandma has thought about this for a long time and that’s why she named me Beretta.

Beretta is her name too and according to her:

“That way your great-grandmother will recognize you right away.”

There’s a lot I want to say about that, but she hasn’t used her real name since leaving Paris and instead goes by Sword Lady, her Urban Name as a Knight Striker. She must have her reasons.

I need to give all of this more thought.

I’ve Signed what I need to do, so I guess I’ll read my grandma’s letter when I get back to my room.

There’s so much I have to do.

But I am little worried about that Heavy Barrel and…yes, about those two in this mansion. They live in a mansion here, but there is no information at all about them in ’98.

I wonder why. Well, I’ll leave all the thinking for tomorrow.